T he White House is increasingly concerned that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) August trip to Taiwan could spark a crisis with China.

President Joe Biden and national security adviser Jake Sullivan should stand down. Pelosi is right. Scrapping her trip against the backdrop of China’s manufactured opprobrium would do far more harm than Pelosi’s visit.

Perhaps some in the White House might want to dismiss Pelosi’s visit as a political stunt. Certainly, such stunts are not beyond Pelosi. Fifteen years ago, she deliberately sought to undermine President George W. Bush’s isolation of Syrian President Bashar al Assad by traveling to Damascus against White House and State Department wishes to meet the brutal dictator she considered at the time to be a reformer. Taiwan is not Syria, however.

For too long, both Republicans and Democrats have appeased China or deferred to its wishes. Nixon-era national security adviser Henry Kissinger may have basked in the idea that his diplomatic mastery brought China in from the cold, but both the Carter and Reagan teams were shocked when they saw in the diplomatic record just how sycophantic Kissinger was to Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai, especially when it came to their demands over Taiwan.

After Kissinger left office, he leveraged his ties into lucrative business deals. Rather than castigate him for the unseemliness of it, Democrats joined in. After leaving office, Carter-era Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke visited China on behalf of Lehman Brothers, Nike, and Seagram. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger leveraged his China ties for Lehman Brothers. Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal visited as the chairman of Burroughs Corporation, and Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland traveled on behalf of Farmland-Eaton World Trade. The same pattern has continued. Until the Trump administration, there was a steady erosion in the frequency and rank of American officials visiting Taiwan, even though nothing in Washington’s dialogue with Beijing prevented such visits.

True, for a decade after the U.S. formally recognized the People’s Republic of China and severed formal ties to Taiwan, no senior U.S. official visited. President George H.W. Bush, whose China credentials were impeccable (he served 14 months in Beijing as the de facto ambassador during the Ford administration), changed this. In 1992, he sent U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, the first Cabinet-level official to visit Taiwan.

President Bill Clinton did more. During his two terms, Secretaries of Transportation Federico Pena and Rodney Slater, Small Business Administration Administrator Phil Lader, and Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson each visited Taipei. George W. Bush did not send any senior officials to Taiwan, and Barack Obama was not much better, sending only Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy. That the most senior State Department visitor Secretary of State John Kerry would send was the special envoy for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex individuals was particularly galling, especially given the enthusiasm of both Obama and Kerry to visit Cuba.

If Biden is serious about both diplomacy and human rights, he has no better emissary to Taiwan than Pelosi. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, it was second-term congresswoman Pelosi who sponsored the bill to suspend the requirement that Chinese students would need to return home. She captured the zeitgeist on the Hill. Her bill passed 403-0.

Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, each made needless concessions to China over Taiwan that shocked their contemporaries and pleasantly surprised China’s Communist rulers. Biden should not follow suit. Taiwan is a fellow democracy and America’s 11th-largest trading partner.

Beijing's bluster aside, China has no right to Taiwan. Even Mao told hagiographer Edgar Snow that Taiwan was as distinct from China as Korea was. If China threatens Taiwan over Pelosi’s visit, the proper response is to deploy a carrier strike group to the region. Folding to Chinese bullying will only encourage more outrageous demands and further damage the international order.

Michael Rubin ( @mrubin1971 ) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.